SanDisk has been a leader in the storage industry for more than 20 years. Founded in 1988 by Dr. Eli Harari, the company has grown from a three-person Silicon Valley startup to the world's largest provider of flash memory storage solutions. The company offers a wide range of products including memory cards, USB flash drives, SSDs and its popular line of Sansa music and video players.

One of the latest additions to SanDisk's line of consumer-oriented solid state drives is the Extreme PRO. Designed with gamers, enthusiasts and media professionals in mind, this high-performance SSD is powered by Marvell's 88SS9187 "Monet" controller and is equipped with SanDisk's new 1Ynm eX2 ABL MLC Toggle NAND flash to deliver up to 550 MB/s sequential read and 520 MB/s sequential write speeds. The Extreme PRO also features a tiered caching system which combines a sizeable DRAM cache with the latest developments in SanDisk's nCache Pro technology. To deliver consistent high performance, nCache Pro uses a large non-volatile SLC cache to accumulate small writes at high speed and then flushes them to the larger MLC sections of the NAND flash memory array.

The Extreme PRO is available in 240GB, 480GB and 960GB capacities. For this review, SanDisk sent us the 480GB version of the drive which comes equipped with 512MB of on-board cache and is capable of delivering up to 550 MB/s sequential read and 515 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 100,000 random read and 90,000 random write IOPS.

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the Extreme PRO has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at SanDisk's new SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the Extreme PRO have what it takes? Can it deliver the value and performance we've come to expect from SanDisk? Keep reading as we find out.